Is John Brown Considered a Terrorist ? Divine Mugunga

Divine Mugunga

Global Terrorism

Prof. Shirk

February 20, 2017

Is John Brown Considered a Terrorist?

Although John Brown might have been fighting for a good cause, the strategies he used to achieve his goal of freeing slaves made him a terrorist. John Brown’s strategies involved carefully choosing a target, which included individuals that upheld slavery even if they alone did not own slaves. His targets might have appeared random because during this time, many people supported slavery but the randomness was actually the best way to instill fear in the population. Many definition of terrorism include random acts of violence as a distinction from other forms of crimes, but Lutz argues that indiscriminate violence is rare and a misreading of what the technique is designed to accomplish. He goes on to explain that victims can be somewhat randomly chosen from within the target audience, but not the population at large. The immediate victims are a means of sending a message to the audience and that the more random the violence appears with in the targeted group the greater the effect. John Brown’s targets sent a message to the audience that anyone one who supports slavery can be a victim of his violent acts.

Terrorism in today’s society carries a negative connotation, but like some scholars point out, this wasn’t always the case. We recently just looked at anarchist, who believed that all men are created equal, so they were against any form of hierarchy and that having a government. In order to make working class conditions better, get rid of government and all forms of hierarchy; anarchist, Average citizens, instilled fear with in the population by setting off bombs at local café and so on. Although anarchist, John Brown and many more had a noble cause for their terrorist acts, it doesn’t make them any less of a terrorist. It is difficult for people to label someone who wants to free slaves a terrorist, but what makes an individual a terrorist is more about the tactics they use and less about their cause and reasons. For example a decade after John Brown, the Ku Klux Klan, white extremist who wanted to restore white supremacy in the south, used the same methods as John Brown used in Kansas, assaults, murder, robbery, arson, and other forms of intimidation to bring this change about. People were quick to label the KKK as a terrorist group not because their tactics instilled fear in people, but because their cause was merely evil.

Therefore terrorism is a technique of using terror as a strategy, it can be used by anyone to achieve a variety of political goals. The negative connotation is what led individuals to call favored groups, such as anarchists and John Brown freedom fighters rather than terrorist and enemy groups, such as Al-Qaeda, terrorist instead of freedom fighters (Lutz and Lutz). For example airline hijackings were not unusual in the 1950 and 60s, caused by American trying to defeat the Cubans or vise versa. These attacks were not generally called terrorism, and those who committed them were not considered terrorist. Instead they were referred to as bandits, rebels, guerillas, insurgents, or revolutionaries (Stampnizky 3). Stampnizky argues that it wasn’t until the mid 1970s that these acts were considered a new urgent problem of terrorism.

Sources
Brenda J. Lutz & James M. Lutz (2014) John Brown as guerrilla terrorist, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 25:5-6, 1039-1054, DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2014.945678